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Abstract:

Edward Said laid some of the foundation stones for postcolonialism, but this project has — for the most part — ignored the pressing question of Palestine that has been the goad for so much of Said's own work. This essay discusses some of the ways in which, in the wake of September 11, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon took advantage of the so-called “war on terrorism” to ratchet up the dispossession of the Palestinian people. It also seeks to show that imaginative geographies are never merely representations — they are also performances of space — and that, in this case (as in others), they have served to rationalise and radicalise colonial aggression, ultimately through the prosecution of a necropolitics.